The major challenge of any such movie is the extreme difficulty of putting Trump himself on screen.
There have been a few movies about Trump’s escapades already, and one thing they have in common is demonstrating that Trump is such a strange and singular figure that it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on him. We’ve all had lots of exposure to him, and we know him as this rambling, slow-motion avalanche of pure id; his motivations are puddle-shallow and obvious, yet his actual personality is slick and slippery and evasive.
An actor playing a role is trying to dig into the person, the human being, but the problem is, Trump is barely a person. He’s a combination of a black hole of needy insecurity and a small grab-bag of battering-ram tactics. There’s no depth, no complexity, no humanity — and this serves to defeat any actor who attempts to play Trump the usual way. Like, Brendan Gleeson is an absolutely terrific actor who’s regularly brilliant in movies like In Bruges, 28 Days Later, and The Guard. But in The Comey Rule, he’s asked to play Trump, and he just flails helplessly. The actor whose run at Trump probably comes off the best is Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice, where he has the advantage of playing Trump early in his life when he’s still sort of human and half-formed and is consciously trying to figure out how to shape himself to best attack the world. But the point is, we’ve all spent lots of time watching Trump by now, and as a consequence, whenever we look at someone trying to capture his bizarre essence, we know instinctively when it’s right and when it’s wrong. And, so far, nobody’s ever managed to come close enough to the truth of the man that it doesn’t fall short into the uncanny valley, which distracts from whatever else the movie might be trying to do.
So my conclusion is, any movie about the Trump years should probably keep the man himself off screen. Make him a lurking presence, behind closed doors, around corners, on the other end of phone calls, that kind of thing. Treat him like the Blair Witch, basically — this unseen malevolence that everyone is being affected by and constantly reacting to without ever knowing exactly what he might do from moment to moment.
With that in mind, it’s easy to imagine an Ianucci-style black comedy about the early days of the COVID epidemic. It would be an ensemble story which portrays the collision between the medical experts and well-intentioned political veterans on one side, and the grifters and pure political loyalists on the other, with Trump as the invisible hub, the gravitational center around whom all helplessly revolve. Take the press conference where Trump suggested injecting bleach. If you try to do that in a conventional way, it’s just a re-creation, and there’s no real drama. But if you stage it as a strategy meeting where the staff is debating plans while they have Trump on TV in the background, and we watch the meeting grind to a halt as everyone listens to Trump in puzzlement and growing horror, then, suddenly, we’ve got drama.
If this is the movie, then it lets you build to a grimly ironic Kubrickian ending where the experts have been defeated and the political loyalists await Trump’s emergence from the hospital after his COVID treatment, and they’re congratulating each other on the dawning of a new day in America. Then you roll credits, and you play Lee Greenwood over footage of the morgue trucks queuing up in the streets of American cities. And never once did you ever see an actor attempting to play Trump, but you know without question this is a story about the effect he had on the country.
Yes, I’ve thought a lot about this.